A year ago I wouldn't have imagined myself saying this, but once they started open sourcing their stuff, I decided to take a look.
If I can keep using my existing server for this new project, for now, then that's great. I know I'll eventually have to migrate it onto its own thing (it's a startup that is taking off, go me! :) ), but until I absolutely have to, I want to keep costs down and processes simple.
Still, if I've got to deploy to an MS-based VPS, that's certainly not the end of the world, not by a long shot. Just a different thing to learn.
IIS performance on the other hand is amazing these days, Apache really needs to find a way to use http.sys.
Really? Even in the server space, Windows still occupies a third of the market, and desktop statistics are somewhere more along the lines of 70%. For every "cool" startup developer, I can promise you there is an entire army of "not cool" developers doing things in Windows (or whatever).
Office 365 is huge. Even the europeans are fleeing from the corpse of the IBM/Lotus stack like rats from a sinking ship. Obviously, I work in a Microsoft shop, but none of our customers (some serious financials, insurance corps, notable Fortune 500s) use Google Docs, and anyone big enough to need to run their own mail infrastructure is bailing on Domino for Exchange, or even going into the cloud with Office 365.
That's where the money is. You have to chase a metric shit-ton of $10 a month consumers to equal a million $ a year business contract.
When you talk development, its almost always on Linux or OSX, and deployed to a Linux server.
MS still holds on to a few markets, and still makes money and does cool things, but they're just not dominant anymore...